…however, the best story in the fifth annual
edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror is Elizabeth Massie’s
“Stephen.”
(I first read Jack Womack’s “Out of Sight, Out ofMind” before “hoarding” behavior was widely known, so the setting, a hoarder’s
house, fascinated. That the hoarder’s obsession was triggered by Fibber McGee’s
closet (the fact that no one seemed to remember Fibber’s closet) also interested
me—I grew up listening to recordings of old radio broadcasts, including Fibber
McGee & Molly, and had a sense of how bizarre it is for a culture to leave
behind something that was once a great common ground. “Out of Sight, Out of
Mind” isn’t just about the fear of losing one’s own past; it’s also about
preservation, and the point at which preservation becomes obsessive and
destructive.
Rereading it now, I’m less bowled over, and the
discovery at the end—what makes “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” horror—seems simply
inevitable.)
Would someone send me a list of stories about (or
that feature) decapitated heads kept alive (magic or science. Also, skulls)?
Off the top of my capitated head is The Arabian Nights (Sage Duban’s head kept
alive on a platter coated with a magic powder), Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, F.Marion Crawford’s “The Screaming Skull,” Ramsey Campbell’s “Heading
Home,” and (maybe) “The Skull of Charlotte Corday.” No films, T.V., or radio
broadcasts, please. Donovan’s Brain? Sure, I’m willing to open the door to
brains kept alive in jars.
“Stephen” is the only story by Elizabeth Massie I
remember, though I’m sure I’ve read others—I had a story in Exotic Gothic 2 and so did she, with “Los Penitentes,” so I read that, “Pinkie” was reprinted in Best New
Horror 17 so I probably read that, and maybe “What Happened When Mosby Paulson
Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book,” too. Anyway.
I don’t want to say much about “Stephen.” It is a decapitated head story, but
it treats that trope seriously, and uses it as an illustration of the other horror
that truly runs the story. Though at sixteen I didn’t understand the sexual issues in
Massie’s story—I understood enough to be troubled by them.
Coincidentally, I wrote
a decapitated head story called “Stephen Plec.” Plec is a Polish word for sex; I
associate the name Stephen with repression and guilt. Plec is a garbage
collector who, out on his route, finds a head in a box, becomes intimate with
it, gets rid of it in a frenzy of self-loathing, but ends up desperately
searching for it in the municipal dump where he works. I wondered if my Stephen was in any way inspired
by Massie’s, but I dug up the original
drafts of “Stephen Plec,” and all were carefully dated “1989.”
